What Are The Most Important Things You Look At When Choosing A Wp/blogger Theme?

The title tells it all.. things like: simplicity, colors, logical structure? etc..

 

Usually, I go for the requirements. First thing which I focus on is the Requirements for the website. I have made a funny blog and a tech blog. So both have absolutely different requirements.

 

First of all you need to think what you'll post on that blog, things like general stuff (personal blog) or specific content like reviews , funny stuff, videos, movie reviews or any other things that you can post.

The second thing that I will look for will be the layout (in WordPress case and for a blog , I would like to use probably a layout with one sidebar: left or right) .

For me and probably for many others , the most important page that tells everything about the website is the homepage , so I will think how would I want things to be arranged on homepage and what to be displayied there (things like newest posts first , how many columns , featured content ... and more ).

Once decided how I want my homepage to look , I will think about what colors combinations will look nice for that type of website. My favorite combination of colors is usually a mix between black , white , gray and some other colors for links. (to give a little of color) , but this depends again for website type.

Depending of what content type I will have , I will search a theme that suits my needs , so like an example , if I would have a blog for personal movies reviews , I would search for a theme that will display post thumbnails and excerpts for first page and not the whole post content. In almost all the cases I like to use themes that will display only a portion of text (Wp excerpt) instead all content and thumbnails of a post.

I usually like to mantain pages quite simple and not overload my website with lots of plugins and things that will make it only to slow down.

 

Is as much about the design and functionality as it is about what lies underneath. The reason why so many professionals use eg. Woothemes and Genesis is because it always adheres to certain standards. Thye can include speed, SEO and most importantly safety. You'll find many themes on Themeforest which look great but don't perform or take days to setup. You can always modify the design afterwards.

This applies to setting up a theme for a client and/or for yourself.

So when I pick a theme this is the stages I follow:

1. Provider
2. Functionality
3. Design

So far this has worked out well for.